The Encrusting Ocean: Life-Forms of the Spongy Wreck

This volume explores nonhuman animals’ involvement with human maritime activities in the age of sail—as well as the myriad multispecies connections formed across different geographical locations knitted together by the long history of global ship movement.

The first national marine sanctuary in the United States was established in the Atlantic Ocean in 1975. It safeguards the remains of the USS Monitor, a Civil War–era ironclad warship that sank off Cape Hatteras, among the barrier islands of North Carolina, in late 1862. Despite its being washed by the warm, vivifying waters of the Gulf Stream, the site has historically been defined almost exclusively as a repository of “cultural,” rather than “natural,” resources. What limited inquiries have been made into the life encouraged by the “artificial reef” reveal a diverse and thriving neighborhood of resident and migratory species. Among the most successful of all are the “encrusting faunal organisms,” including perhaps forty varieties of sponge. Along the Monitor’s best-preserved sections—its foreparts—iron has been cladded anew with a layer of “thick marine calcareous growth,” an exceptionally hospitable habitat of and for poriferans and soft corals.